Dan Rubins is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Hear Your Song, a 501(c)(3) organization that empowers children and teens with serious illnesses and complex health needs to make their voices heard through collaborative songwriting. After launching Hear Your Song as an undergraduate organization while a sophomore at Yale University, Dan led the organization's national and virtual expansion in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, Hear Your Song has helped over 250 kids ages 6-18 in 27 states and 6 countries write their own songs with the support of hundreds of volunteer musicians around the world. A musical theater and opera composer himself, Dan also holds an MA in Elementary Inclusive Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and an MA in Shakespeare Studies from King's College London/Shakespeare's Globe. About Hear Your Song, Inc.: Hear Your Song, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in New York City that empowers children and teens with serious illnesses and complex health needs to make their voices heard through collaborative songwriting. Hear Your Song provides power and choice — and a microphone — to young people with a wide range of diagnoses, both mental and physical health conditions, who are so often deprived of both power and choice in living their day-to-day life and in managing their health care journeys. Hear Your Song gives kids who are often cast to the margins the chance to define themselves beyond their diagnoses, embraced and validated by a community that responds with caring, collaborative creativity to help each young person tell their stories through song. Hear Your Song first launched as an undergraduate organization at Yale University in May 2014, piloting partnerships at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital and Elizabeth Seton Children’s in Yonkers, NY. Six years later, at the start of the pandemic, we realized that it was more important than ever to allow children with serious illnesses to share their stories and find a community of support while most isolated and at risk. So, in March 2020, Hear Your Song began a national expansion, offering virtual sessions to kids wherever they are, whether they’re staying at a hospital or receiving treatment or recovering at home. Hear Your Song has now supported over 200 children ages 6-18 in writing their own songs. At the same time, we've grown six undergraduate-led, campus-based chapters; engaged hundreds of volunteer musicians around the globe; and built over a dozen partnerships with children’s hospitals, specialized schools/camps, and other nonprofits, including the Montefiore Medical Center, Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Double H Ranch Camp, The ELM Project, and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation. We focus our outreach to new communities on populations often overlooked in pediatric arts programming, especially kids with diagnoses that disproportionately impact communities of color.

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